There are many obvious things that could be said here about the blurring of the line between the apparently entertaining and the putatively political, about crass and conspicuous opportunism, about this being the final sign of the imminence of Armageddon. I'd rather throw more bodies in the camper-van. Here are the other people I think would profit from going on an outdoor adventure with Kate Gosselin and Sarah Palin:

1) Tony Hayward: He's no longer at BP, so he's got more time on his hands. He could use an image boost, as everyone tends to hate him. But one glimpse of Tony surreptitiously trying to drill for oil while dealing with the madcap escapades of 8 adorable child hooligans would surely be enough to catapult him back into our good graces.

2) Rod Blagojevich: I just think he should be everywhere, at all times.

3) Mel Gibson: If he wants to restore his image (back to what it was before this time AND the time before when he was upset at women and Jews), he should start by showing a softer side by surrounding himself with delightful tots, dim-witted/opportunistic women and the great outdoors. And Danny Glover should be there, too.

4) Justin Bieber: He can't let himself get lazy. Or soft. He has to continue to challenge himself by trying to escape from teenage girls on a segway across different types of terrain. Also, the teenage girls willing to follow him to Alaska would be the really crazy ones. And Kate Gosselin would totally fight them. It would be awesome.

5) Shirley Sherrod: She's hot right now. Really hot. And while she seems like a nice, sensible person, they could always edit her scenes later to make her look like a total racist.

Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on theTHE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.

I am a great admirer of the Tea Party Express, an exciting grassroots political movement in the United States that is for underground bunkers and against secret Communists.

Recently, the NAACP (I don't know what that stands for, but I know it has something to do with organized whining!!) came out and said the Tea Party movement was racist, just because there are so many racists in it.

Tea Party Express organizer and, inevitably, conservative talk radio host Mark Williams responded to this charge by writing a devilishly clever satirical piece in the form of satire. Here's just one hilarious satirical snippet from this satire:

Some people, though, did not realize that because this letter was satirical, it could not be racist. The National Tea Party Federation (which the Tea Party Express belonged to even though everyone in it thought Swift's A Modest Proposalwas really about eating Irish babies!!) expelled the Tea Party Express so it could prove it wasn't satirically racist to the gay, socialist, secret Muslims who run this county.

You're probably wondering why I'm writing to you about all this. Well, Tea Party Express spokesman Joe Wierzbicki got so mad at the secret lesbian Unitarians who run the National Tea Party Federation that he said the following:

Well, further thought (and over 5,000 letters from members of a powerful political lobbying group known as LARP) has led him to the conclusion he may have spoken in haste. It may be that the United Federation of Planets has something to teach the Tea Party movement. I've learned that:

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not in favour of it when secret fascists form giant, taxation-addicted governments, but when Tea Party activists band together to lead a tithe-enhanced libertarian rebellion, well, that's something else.

The thing is, when right-wing fringe groups join forces to fight secret Jon Stewart Bolsheviks, we stop being so fringe-y. We start being able to do outrageous things like influence elections. We don't like losing fringe credibility by forming larger organizations, and we certainly don't like working with other groups whose ideas won't fit on their placards, but we do quite like setting the national agenda and listening to Anderson Cooper say our names.

I would be so grateful if you could give me advice to pass along to Joe Wierzbicki about how to how to transform autonomous organizations into semi-autonomous ones that are controlled by the Tea Party and that agree to abide by the principles of:

Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on theTHE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.

I often feel as though unborn children are laughing at me. That people who do not yet exist are already beginning to snicker. If one is a thoughtful, sensitive, imaginative person (I am obviously referring to myself AND preparing to say something terribly portentous), then one realizes life is like a book one will never finish, like a movie one will miss the end of, like other things one thinks are gripping that one will be prevented from seeing through until the end.

I recently heard Dr. Michio Kaku, a fancy string-theory person who is pictured on his website looking like Doctor Who standing in front of a powerful fan, talk about his new book, Physics of the Impossible. He claims that, because we can now teleport atoms, it might be possible in the future to teleport larger things. Like Dr. Michio Kaku. He also contends that time travel might be possible in the future, and that the reason we don't notice that we're surrounded by time travelers from the future is that they are wearing clothes that make them invisible (which will also be possible in the future).

These are very exciting suggestions. I would like to be teleported. I would like to travel back in time and stare knowingly and condescendingly at the people who can't see me through my invisibility clothes.

But, you know what? I probably won't live long enough these things happen. Dr. Kaku probably won't live long enough to see these things happen. Even if I do live long enough to see these things happen, I won't live long enough to see the equally exciting things that will happen after my death happen. I will never know how this all ends, whether this all ends, which science fiction narratives were eerily prescient. Smug little future people will look back at my generation and think smug things like: "How did they ever get around without hover Hummers?" "They ate food?! What a quaint, curious thing to do?" "They had organs? How impractical!"

I hate that the people of the future will know more than I do. When I studied the period "between the wars" (1918-1939 for those of you who haven't yet discovered the glory that is looking back smugly at generations past), I was haunted by the fact that the people who lived then didn't know they were living between the wars. They probably thought of themselves as simply post-war. But I know better. I know that the world was headed for yet another appalling conflagration. And they didn't. Which means that some irritating undergraduate with great self-regard will think something about us. She/he will think how amazing it was that we didn't know yet. About the coming war? About the unprecedentedly important scientific discovery? Who knows. I don't, and that drives me crazy.

Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on theTHE CATASTROPHIZER page.

POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.